Drugs in the form of solid dosage tablets are often analyzed in pharmaceutical laboratories for their total content as well as for the uniformity of content. This data is used by pharmaceutical companies for quality control and other purposes. Traditionally, a tablet is prepared for analysis manually in a labor intensive procedure that is slow and can result in preparation errors. First, the tablet is placed in a volumetric flask. Solvent is then added and the flask is placed on a mechanical shaker or sonicator. This manual method is not only time consuming, but also prone to errors. It also generally requires the use of considerable amounts of solvents in order to fully dissolve the active ingredients of the tablet. Some of the solvents are dangerous and thus present a hazard to the chemist performing the analysis.
Some tablets are very hard and, therefore, difficult to dissolve. These tablets must be pulverized either manually, using a mortar and pestle, or mechanically, using various known pulverizing apparatus which either emulate a mortar and pestle by grinding the tablet between two relatively moving surfaces or mimic the crushing action of a hammer and/or, in the case of wet grinding, the shearing action of a homogenizer or blender. All such mechanical pulverizers and blenders are an improvement over the mortar and pestle as far as reducing the time it takes to get the active ingredients of most tablets into solution. However, they are still unable to process efficiently the harder tablets such as certain time release tablets that are in wide use at the present time. The extraction of these tablets is still done manually for the most part, or if done mechanically, it takes a relatively long time to release the active ingredients of those tablets into solution. Resultantly, it is difficult to provide a fully automated system for completely and reliably extracting and accurately analyzing the contents of such tablets. As a consequence, in many cases, it takes an inordinately long time to obtain the results of a particular assay and, even then, the results may be compromized by human error while performing the extraction.